


ARTUSIAN TRIPTYCH

by spicyshimmy



Series: Dragon Wars [5]
Category: Dragon Age
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Fusion, Crossover, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-11-22
Updated: 2011-11-22
Packaged: 2017-10-26 10:43:40
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 602
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/282131
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/spicyshimmy/pseuds/spicyshimmy
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Part of a series of vignettes for a Dragon Age/Star Wars AU, written for Kassafrassa on tumblr, with whom the concept was developed. <i>Each stance ready. Each connected to each. Hawke sweats but Fenris does not sweat, and when they open their eyes, they have found their way past daylight. </i></p>
            </blockquote>





	ARTUSIAN TRIPTYCH

I.  
Fenris no longer considers the marks of contact, the target zones or the rings of defense, for each guard is an attack, each attack on guard, one continuous form that becomes the body in the end—or in the beginning—or an extension of the body, or an extension of each breath. That he can practice with Hawke while their eyes remain shut would not be any surprise to either; it would be correct, a meditation of its own, form that follows function that is form again. It is eternal. It is etched into their skin. It is the pulse of the Force and that which beats liquid through the Artusian crystals, clever and quick and humming bright.

Each stance ready. Each connected to each. Hawke sweats but Fenris does not sweat, and when they open their eyes, they have found their way past daylight.

Each sun has set. Hawke wipes the back of his neck with the edge of his robes, but Fenris can still feel the heat and the truth, the presence they strip away and melt to nothing like metals purified—like a child with no aptitude, no inclinations, brought to the Force with Artus Prime’s aid.

II.  
Fenris no longer sleeps in the same as another might, though these are not the standards to which he measures his sense of self. It merely is, that he does not travel somewhere beyond meditation’s deepest edge, where dreams begin—dreams he has not thought to have in many years. He sits beside and within the doorway instead, shoulders against the frame, elbow against a bent knee and night-winds questing under the fabric of his cloak, observing a different edge: that moment upon the horizon when the moons dip far below and the twin suns chart their rise. It is not their movement that maps the change of hours, the place between dusk and dawn, but it is perspective, and there is meaning in the study of one remote body as it follows its course while keeping other courses in mind.

One weapon meets and counteracts another. So, too, are the moons bound to other forces. The tension between them—it is a gesture Fenris can yet recognize.

Nights on one planet are the same as the nights on any other, save for the factors of temperature, the factors of moons, and the factors of nearby company.

III.  
Fenris no longer feels the first disturbance, in the moment that it was felt no greater than a pebble lost beneath the surface of the water—but with the same heaviness, the same after-shudders, the ripples that remain despite that deep sink of pain before the swallowing silence.

He is no Jedi. He is no master for he has no master—and therefore he is no apprentice. But to sense the Force is to sense its disturbances, one beside the other, a form all its own, a balance like the moons and the suns, though one is dark and one is bright.

This is always the way.

He is on his feet in an instant. Hawke stumbles from his bed, hair tousled and eyes wide and a crease upon his cheek, from the press of his pillow while he was sleeping.

This is the night they will remember, the loss they shared, the beginning of the slaughter—Fenris’s eyes on Hawke’s fingers as they clutch at the fabric upon his chest, unable to reach or quell the pain that rests far beneath.

Hawke will never forgive himself that he was not there, at the temple on Coruscant, when the younglings were killed.


End file.
